It was during this period, surcharged with great
anxiety for those of us who had held out,
that we first thought of having a look back
to put into order the events as they had
thus far enfolded. It had all begun, after
a true beginning of which we had not
the slightest remembrance but could only infer
from the evidence out of which our very lives
were composed – I’m referring to the Breach,
needless to say…it had all begun with a time
of indeterminate length – possibly moments,
possibly ages – during which we did
nothing more than lay about, conscious of only
our inability to channel the act of
suspiration into a spoken thought
or to convert the moment to moment tension
and slackening of the musculature into
an action as decisive as prying
oneself from one’s seat or from the corner of wall
that one had been leaning against throughout that time.
Then Scrawl had come forth. It was no longer
remembered, in fact, to what purpose he’d come forth
or with what objects apart from his implements
of writing that were always in motion.
Perhaps this was unclear simply because we all
were preoccupied at that time with regaining
a sense of ourselves. But what mattered most
was simply that he had come forth. The first order
of business that we came to after Scrawl had thus
awoken us or called us to ourselves
was the joke recollection and the subsequent
joke-tellings, the unfortunate outcome of which
was that the older people among us –
everyone old enough, that is, to remember
much of anything that had gone on in the world
before the Breach – lost the ability
to comprehend humor and to react before
an amusing incident with laughter, perhaps
a final severance of the greater
accord from the specific physicality
that had governed our relations previously
with the exterior world of objects.
This mournful discovery inaugurated
an interim period during which the youth
requested that they be relegated
charge of the proceedings – a request that soon turned
into a demand after the catastrophic
attempts that were made at song retrieval.
This is the time during which the academies
were established, the Venue was given a name,
and the Theater of the Breach was born.
By the time this period had come to an end,
the LA had established itself, had taken
the Recovery under its command,
and had commenced work on the enormous project
of hauling up the Tales, in which they discovered
a hero now to be promulgated
as a maker and savior of men and women.
In addition to all of this, we had begun
to explore the murky Periphery.
Thus, the events that could be enumerated
in an initial stocktaking. In addition
to such events, of course, we had the men
and women themselves – an accord that had split off
into a lesser subset and a diminished
greater (a much diminished, I should say).
And then there was Scrawl, who at the moment appeared
to occupy a privileged, ambivalent,
perhaps shifting site in the middle of
these two accords. Finally, in addition to
the events and the men and women in whom they
were played out, there was the set of objects
we found in front of us, emerging one by one
from the Breach as from out of a wondrous gift-bag,
which consisted of manuscript fragments,
memories (“the Reservoir”), and a wide array
of gadgets. A few key events, a divided
people, and several sorts of objects –
such were the elements that made up our world, which
was neither entirely old nor entirely new.
It was the gadgetry that presented
the biggest problem in terms of getting started.
From the Fragments and the Reservoir, we gathered
that there were gadgets (or that there would be
gadgets, after the Retrieval had made them all
available to us) that could be put to use
for every purpose imaginable.
Gadgets for marking time, gadgets for improving
the speed and the performance of our vehicles,
gadgets for enforcing the punitive
code, gadgets for propelling men and women high
into the heavens, gadgets for monitoring
other gadgets, gadgets for removing,
retrieving, repairing and replacing other
gadgets, gadgets for delivering yet other
gadgets into the jaws of still others,
gadgets to beget, gadgets to destroy gadgets.
Yet which gadgets were to be employed for which aims,
which purposes? And which other, smaller
gadgets were needed for setting into motion
the gadgets that would fulfill these same purposes?
Often it was tremendously tasking
merely determining whether a specific
item of material that had been retrieved
was to be classified as a gadget.
The LA drew up a list of criteria
with which litter might be differentiated
from debris – the former term referring
to those gadgets and parts of gadgets determined
to have been wrought of the hands of men and women
(though not our own), the later to mere stuff
of nature (though even this distinction, it’s true,
was problematic, for much of what was labeled
“debris” could quite well have been extracted
and set aside by human hands for the uses,
say, of study, or perhaps for their employment
as raw material in the making
of gadgets, and should in this case be regarded
as of an intermediate category.
Then there was the confusion that began
when the LA had begun their ascendancy.
They treated the gadgets much as if they were toys,
taking them apart and putting them back
together to create new gadgets that would serve
the simple purposes for which, say, a gavel
or a handbag would have more than sufficed.
Who’d have guessed, from the generally good-natured
debates on the fragile legacy of the texts,
that the youthful accord would soon falter
upon the diversity of uncertainties
that would soon arise with respect to the gadgets?
[Next: Finders Keepers]